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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Acknowledgments

  Photo Captions

  Permissions

  About Michael Hainey

  To Brooke

  “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

  —THE MAXIM OF CHICAGO NEWSPAPERMEN, ATTRIBUTED TO EDWARD “EULIE” H. EULENBERG, REPORTER AND NIGHT EDITOR, CITY NEWS BUREAU OF CHICAGO, 1927–1957

  “It is the dead, not the living, who make the longest demands.”

  —SOPHOCLES

  1

  WHAT YOU ARE

  I was home from school, visiting my grandmother in Chicago, when she told me this story, a story that involved an old Polish custom: When a boy has his first birthday, his family sits him in his high chair, and on the tray before him they place three objects—

  Coin

  Shot glass

  Crucifix

  “Whatever the boy chooses,” my grandmother says to me, “that will be his life.”

  “And I?” I said. “What did I choose?”

  “You?” she says. “You slammed your fist on the tray, sent everything scattering to the ground. There was your mother, on her knees, searching, cursing you and all the pieces she couldn’t find.”

  “I never heard that story.”

  “There’s lots of stories you haven’t heard.”

  #

  Even when I was a kid, and the holiday dinner was over, the plates pushed aside and the adults having coffee and the kolaczki that my grandmother always made, I’d linger at the table, ask her questions about the old days. How, when my mother was a young girl they had no money for medicine, so if she had a sore throat, my grandmother would make mashed potatoes, roll them in a dish towel, and put them on my mother’s neck. A hot compress. Or she’d tell me how my mother learned to play the accordion from Mr. Carnevale, down the block. Every Saturday, wrestling her instrument into her red wagon, pulling it to his studio on 63rd Street.

  Once, some years ago, we were sitting around my mother’s kitchen table playing cards—my mother, my grandmother, and me; the matriarchy and me. (My grandfather was dead by now, and my father had died years earlier.) I asked my grandmother what it was like when she first got married. This was 1934. Middle of the Great Depression. They said their vows on Thanksgiving, so they could cobble together a four-day weekend and call it their honeymoon, such as it was. My grandfather was the only one working in his family—supporting his parents and his eight brothers and sisters—so he was unable to take any time off for the wedding, let alone a honeymoon. Not that they had the money to. Eighteen months later, my mother was born.

  My grandmother tells me that she and my grandfather were so poor that they could not afford a crib for my mother, and for the first year she slept in an old dresser drawer.

  “Sometimes at night I’d tuck your momma in and then Grampa and I would go to the corner tavern and have a beer. Cost a nickel. That was our Friday night.”

  “Wait,” my mother says. “You left me home in the drawer? Alone?”

  “You weren’t alone,” my grandmother tells her.

  “Who was watching me?” my mother asks.

  “God.”

  My mother slams her hand on the table, gets up, and starts washing dishes.

  My grandmother looks at me. “What’s she so hot about?”

  #

  One Christmas Eve, I had driven my grandmother and grandfather home. We’re sitting at the kitchen table, a bowl of pears between us, ripening green to yellow. My grandparents are telling me a story about the old neighborhood, and they can’t agree on when the story happened. My grandfather taps his finger softly on the table, three times, and says, “No, it was 1917. I know because it was the summer we hanged the kaiser in effigy.”

  “You’re right,” my grandmother says. “There was a parade through the neighborhood, and we strung him up on a streetlight in front of Saint Adalbert’s. Lit a big fire out of trash.”

  And I’m sitting there, thinking: How many people remain who can speak the sentence “It was the summer we hanged the kaiser in effigy”?

  Her parents were from Krakow. “Crack-oov” is how she’d say it. She told me that her father tuned organs in a church there. They ended up in Chicago. Back of the Yards neighborhood. Poles. Germans. Austrians. What my grandfather called “Bohunks and Polacks, all of us.”

  Her father ran a corner store. Canned goods. Boxes of basics. Shelves of staples for the families who washed up on the block. Families of men who worked the slaughterhouses—the Chicago Union Stock Yards. For a good hundred years, there was nothing like it on earth. An entire square mile of Chicago, devoted to butchering cattle and hogs or any other beast a man could ship from America’s hinterlands—our prairies and plains—turning it into canned meat, churning all of it into the bounty of America. This was the land of Swift, the kingdom of Armour. Chicago as the disassembly line. Chicago—how fast and how efficiently a creature could be reduced. Rendered. Broken down.

  On summer nights, when the wind blew off the lake, the stench of death and dung hung over the whole city. My grandmother told me that some nights in her bed, she’d be awakened by what she called “the sad groaning”—beasts in the dark, all those miles away. Chicago.

  That was them. Running their store and living in a small apartment in the back of it: my grandmother, her baby sister, her father and mother. That is, until her brother is born and their mother dies in the bedroom, giving birth. Her father pushed the baby into my grandmother’s hands, the baby still bloody, said, “Here.”

  Then he got drunk.

  My grandmother was left to raise her sister and her baby brother. A year later, when my grandmother was twelve, her father found a new wife—Sally. Sally was sixteen. Sally turned my grandmother’s father against her, and the day that my grandmother turned fifteen, she left, took a job cleaning houses for some rich people. But she persevered. To me, perseverance is the great trait. She taught me that.

  I was in my thirties when I told my grandparents I wanted to see the old neighborhood. This was March. Thick of Lent. We get in my mother’s Buick. Chunks of rotting snow cling to the edge of the road, crusted over with carbon. Looking like they were smeared with newsprint. News of days long past, forgotten.

  When we get to the old neighborhood, I round a corner and hear my grandfather from the backseat.

  “Black Betty lived in that house. Olive skin. Give her a quarter and she’d let you lie with her in the weedy lot.”

  In the rearview mirror, I see my grandmother elbow him.

  “What?” he says. “I never done it. But it’s true. That’s the story I heard.”

  I want to see Saint Adalbert’s, where they were married. One of those hulking masses of soot-stained stone, the kind they always tell you was built by immigrants’ pennies and nickels—and as we start walking up the steps my grandmother freezes. She’s been holding my arm to steady herself on the icy steps, but now she’s tightened her grip. She tells me she’s thinking of when her mother died and men shouldered her coffin from their house through the streets, to the church.

  “When t
he guys carrying my mother’s casket got here, they set it down on the steps right here and opened it. ‘Final viewing,’ the priest said. I was standing next to her casket, and when I look down at my mother, I saw her face move. I thought she was alive. And I tug my father’s sleeve. Oh, I was so happy. I thought, God has heard me. And then my father says, ‘Look again.’ And you know what it was? Little worms. They’d already started.”

  She looks at me. Her bottom lip trembles.

  “We couldn’t afford to preserve her.”

  # # #

  Years later, I was home from New York one October when I went to see my grandmother. Over the past few months, she had been “deteriorating.” Mentally. In the span of six months she’d gone from living on her own to being in a nursing home. Or “assisted living,” as they call it now. She was in Central Baptist Village. Not that she’s Baptist. But it was closer to my mother’s house than any Catholic place, and my grandmother agreed to it.

  Moving her was hard on my mother. Not just the packing up of my grandmother’s house, winnowing down her possessions, but the stress and strain of being responsible for her. I’d hear it in our phone calls.

  That morning, my mother asks me to take an afghan to my grandmother.

  “I think she needs an extra blanket,” she says.

  The afghan is the same one that we had in the basement when I was a boy, the one my brother and I wrapped ourselves in when we watched reruns on the TV—our Zenith. My grandmother knit the afghan years ago, for my mother. Over the years, my grandmother has knit too many afghans to count. She makes them as wedding gifts. Somewhere in my mother’s basement there is one she knit for me. “I can’t wait forever, honey child,” she told me when I caught her knitting mine. “You’re forty. The way you’re going, who knows how long it’ll be.”

  #

  On my way to see her, I stop at Fannie May, the candy store. I get a small mixed assortment. A blustery, chill day. Fall, advancing on Chicago. Leaves—yellow, rain-battered, pulled down in the night—cling to cars and the damp blacktop.

  I find her in the Common Room. A bunch of gray tufts and bald, liver-spotted heads seated in a semicircle. At the center, a heavy woman in white pants and a purple smock. The woman is leading them in group exercises, getting them to raise their arms over their heads, move their limbs in small circles.

  “Let’s repeat our vowels,” she says, “A, E, I, O, U.”

  From the group, a murmuring. “Ehh . . . Eee . . . Eye . . . Oh . . . Ewe.”

  With each vowel, they lower their arms a few inches. They look like aged mariners, sending semaphore. Signaling to ships in the mist somewhere out at sea.

  Eighty, ninety years ago, these people are sitting in a schoolroom, in the same messy half circle, being led through the same drill—minus the arm exercises. And here they are now, on the other side of life. Trying to hold on to what they learned so long ago.

  I walk over and touch her shoulder. I’m prepared for her not to recognize me. Her eyes, all exaggerated behind her glasses, try to focus on me. She takes my hand.

  “Michael . . . ”

  #

  We walk the long hallway to her room. She leans on her walker, plows ahead, slowly. I walk beside her, my hand on the small of her curved back. She’s like an old car—she drifts left—so I have to ease her away from the wall.

  “Look at me,” she says. “I’m just a skeleton. I should go trick-or-treating. I’d scare ’em all good, I would.”

  Her room has two single beds, hospital types, made to be raised up, angled. The bed near the door is unmade, waiting. On it, the Sunday Tribune sits unread. The bed beneath the window is my grandmother’s. On the nightstand are two photo albums my brother’s son made for her. “Moments of her life,” he told me they were, “to help her remember.” My nephew is eight.

  To the right of the bed, there’s an armoire. On it, someone has taped a piece of paper, computer-printed:

  ESTELLE HUDAK

  FAMILY DOES OWN LAUNDRY

  She maneuvers to the bed. There’s a wheelchair in the corner and I pull it up, sit toe-to-toe with her.

  “I brought you a trick-or-treat,” I say, and I place the box on her lap.

  For a minute, she holds the box and gazes at it, then hands it back to me.

  “Can I have one?” she asks.

  I give her a chocolate cream. She raises it to her mouth. A tongue emerges, takes the candy. Like a tortoise I saw at the zoo. She bites, almost in slow motion, chews so slowly I swear I can feel her tasting it.

  She asks, “Why’d you bring me candy?”

  “I told you,” I say. “Halloween.”

  She says, “Is it Halloween? I can’t remember.”

  As I put the candy on the nightstand, I notice a piece of paper. “That’s my bedtime reading,” she says to me.

  It’s a pamphlet from Resurrection Cemetery. Inside, there is a form filled out. My grandfather’s burial record:

  NAME: FRANK HUDAK

  GRAVE: 3

  LOT: 13

  BLOCK: 21

  SECTION: 59

  “That’s going to be my address soon,” my grandmother says. “I read that every night before I go to bed so that if I don’t wake up, I know where to go. I don’t want Saint Peter putting me on the wrong bus. Grave four. Right next to my little Franta. Sixty-seven years we were married, Mike.”

  Her head droops down, chin against her chest. I reach out, my hand under her chin. Raise her head. Tears are in her eyes, and I wipe them with my fingers.

  “I wish it were over, Mike. People weren’t meant to live this long.”

  “Did you take your pills today?” I say to her.

  “Yes.”

  Ninety-five years old, and she’s on antidepressants. What’s the world come to? I think.

  Truth is, she never got over my grandfather’s dying. That whole year after, she’d sit at the kitchen table and cry, stare out the shutters.

  She reaches out, takes my hands in hers.

  “Warm my hands,” she says. “They’re cold.”

  She slips her hands inside my cupped hands. Her hands like two small mammals burrowing inside a hollow, hunkering down against each other, against the coming freeze.

  “I used to worry about you,” she says, “but I don’t anymore. You’re over the wall.”

  “What’s the wall?”

  “Fear.”

  2

  THE SHADE, RAISED

  April 24, 1970. Friday morning. The sun, searing the shade, my brother’s and mine. We share a room. Twin beds above the kitchen, side by side. Headboards against the wall beneath the window that looks down on a tiny cement patio. A small house next to an alley next to a grocery-store parking lot. Kroger.

  Scraggly forsythias divide our alley from the parking lot. Fragile yellow flowers the color of Peeps pop on the thin branches. Mostly the branches catch the trash that forever swirls in our lot. Flyers and circulars. Papers.

  This is on the Far Northwest Side, a block from the Kennedy Expressway, in the shadow of O’Hare.

  # # #

  My mother’s hand on my shoulder. “Time for school,” she says.

  She wears a blue robe and pale blue slippers that look like sandals. She is thirty-three, thin with frosted brunette hair and deep, heavy-lidded almond-shaped brown eyes and a tight mouth. She looks like Queen Elizabeth. It’s like they’re twins in time. Pick a photo of Elizabeth from any year and lay a photo of my mother next to it. Sisters, you’d say. Especially in the mouth and eyes. Same hair, too. My mother has always wished her hair were curlier, that it had more body. For years, my grandmother gave her a perm every few months, my mother hanging her head in our cold gray washtub.

  The doorbell rings. My mother says, “Who could that be?”

  She walks to the window and raises the shade.

  “What the hell are they doing here?” she says.

  Below, my grandfather and grandmother, my uncle Dick and aunt Helen, are standing on the porch in
the shadow of our honey locust tree, its tiny leaves fluttering in the breeze.

  My mother walks out.

  From the air vents along the floorboards my brother and I can hear the adults in the kitchen below. No words. Just sounds.

  I remember exactly what happens when I get into that kitchen—and every moment afterward. But sitting with my brother on the edge of our beds in our pajamas, that bright morning in April, him eight and me six—even now I feel like I’m imagining it.

  My brother and I pause at the top of the stairs. Then there we are, on the edge of the living room.

  “The boys are here,” Uncle Dick says.

  He pushes us forward, into the kitchen. The sun is bright. The linoleum white and cold on my bare feet. My mother sits at the kitchen table, in the chair she will sit in the rest of her life. Her chair to solve the Jumble. Her crosswords chair. Her chair for solitaire. My grandmother stands behind her, a handkerchief’d fist to her mouth.

  My mother reaches out. “Come over here.”

  She sets us on her chair, my brother and me, side by side. We’re still that small.

  “Your dad is dead.”

  Her eyes are red but she is not crying. “It’s going to be okay,” she says. “We’ll be fine.”

  She hugs us. And as I sit there, crushed against my brother, held tight by my mother’s arm, I can feel, against my chest, my brother’s chest, quivering. I struggle to pull back from my mother’s embrace.

  He’s crying.

  In that moment I think only one thing: how excited I am. Because my whole life up until then, my brother has never cried. Whenever I have cried, he’s always teased me, told me I was a baby. I point at him and start to laugh and I say, “Crybaby! Crybaby!”

  3

  THE NIGHT SLOT

  My father was the night slot man. That’s a newspaper term. From the time he is a young boy of six or seven in Dust Bowl Nebraska, back in the Depression, all he wants is to work in newspapers. All he wants is to escape, to get to Chicago and be a newspaperman, just like his brother.